America's
foreign policy has gone into a tailspin. Almost every major initiative from the
Obama administration has run into sharp, sometimes embarrassing, reverses. The
U.S. looks weak and confused on the global stage.

This
might come as happy news to some opponents of the administration who enjoy
seeing Barack Obama fail, but it shouldn't.

America's
failure in international strategy is a disaster-in-the-making for its allies
and for the people who see the U.S. model of liberal democracy as one worth
emulating in their own nations.

Obama
dramatically warned Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, as he slaughtered his
people by the thousands, that if he used chemical or biological weapons, he
would cross a "red line." The line was crossed and not much happened.
Syria is crumbling, self-destructing in a civil war that I, for one, believe could have
turned out quite differently if Washington had offered material and
diplomatic support for moderates in the opposition. Fears that the opposition
would be dominated by extremists became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The centerpiece of the Obama/Clinton foreign policy
initiative was Egypt. You know how that has worked out:

But it
is Egypt where America's foreign policy fiasco is most visible.

It was
in Cairo in 2009, where the newly elected Obama, still reflecting the glow of
sky-high expectations, launched his campaign to repair relations with the
so-called "Muslim World."…

Nobody
knew what would happen in Cairo's Tahrir Square a few years later. But today,
the same people who yearned for democracy despise Washington. When Egyptians
elected a Muslim Brotherhood president, Washington tried to act respectfully,
but it showed a degree of deference to the Muslim Brotherhood that ignored the
ways in which the group violated not only Egyptians' but America's own
standards of decency and rule of law.

As
tensions in Egypt grow between Islamists on one side and the military and
anti-Islamists on the other, there is one sentiment shared by all: Both sides
feel betrayed by Washington.

Egypt's
most powerful man, Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, said, "You [the U.S.] left
the Egyptians; you turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won't forget
that."

It’s gotten so bad that the New York Times cannot even
defend the administration. It offers a harshly negative commentary on the Obama
administration decision to shut down its embassies in the Islamic world and to
evacuate the personnel—though, to be fair, the administration refused to call
it an evacuation. You would think this comes from the National Review:

The
gloating among jihadists and their sympathizers began last week, right after
the United States shut down almost two dozen diplomatic posts across the Middle
East in response to a terrorist threat.

“God is
great! America is in a condition of terror and fear from Al Qaeda,” wrote one
jihadist in an online forum. Another one rejoiced: “The mobilization and
security precautions are costing them billions of dollars. We hope to hear more
of such psychological warfare, even if there are no actual jihadi operations on
the ground.”

The
jihadists are not the only ones who see the new terrorist alert in a caustic
light.

The
Obama administration’s decision to evacuate so many diplomats on such short
notice — however justified by the seriousness of the threat — has upset some of
its foreign partners, who say the gesture contributes to a sense of panic and
perceived weakness that plays into the hands of the United States’ enemies, and
impedes their efforts to engage with people in their countries.

It’s amateur hour in American foreign policy.

And then, there’s Libya. You remember Libya. You remember
that NATO, spurred on by a French philosopher, intervened in a civil war.
America, in Obama’s immortal words, was leading from behind.

Libya was the test case of the Obama doctrine of hands-off
warfare. Our president wanted to show that we could exercise influence over the
outcome of a war—you know, nudge the parties in the right direction—without involving
American troops.

We may not have known exactly who we were supporting, but our
guys won the war.

While no one is paying very much attention to Libya—certainly
French philosophers aren’t—the situation is rapidly deteriorating.

So says The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker, another pillar
of the mainstream media, paints a bleak picture of Libya:

With no
further need for war and with Western powers fussing over what was being
vaunted as the oil-rich nation’s new democracy, Libya should have once again
achieved peace and stability. Instead, the country, of more than six million
people, seems to have been fatally destabilized by the war to remove its
dictator, and it is increasingly out of control. Militias that arose on various
regional battlefronts found themselves in possession of vast arsenals and large
swaths of territory. Despite the orchestration of parliamentary elections and
the assumption of nominal rule by civilian politicians in Tripoli, those
militias have not stood down; instead, they have used their force and their
firepower to try to effect change in the capital, even, on several occasions,
besieging government buildings. They have also fought one another over
long-held regional enmities; the most recent such battle occurred last month.

You recall that when America invaded Iraq, Colin Powell said
something like: You broke it; you own it. How many Obama supporters, Gen.
Powell included, will accept that we own the situation in Libya:

In June
and July, dozens of Libyans were killed in separate clashes between militias in
Benghazi and Tripoli. The past week or so has been particularly bad. On Friday,
July 26th, a prominent lawyer in Benghazi, Abdelsalam al-Mismari, was shotkilled as
he left a mosque after Friday prayers. Mismari was a prominent leader of the
2011 rebellion against Qaddafi, and, more recently, he had emerged as a vocal
opponent of the country’s second-largest political group, the Justice and
Construction Party, a conservative faction allied with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The suspicion is that extremists assassinated him. Two security officials were
also killed in the city that day. Then, on July 27th, more than a thousand
inmates broke out of a prison outside Benghazi, in still murky
circumstances. (This mass jailbreak coincided with others, linked to Al Qaeda,
in Baghdad, and to the Taliban, in Pakistan.)

By now, we know how that Arab Spring has been working out. The
New Yorker continues:

Libya
lacks the ability to police its borders, not to mention its armories, and Al
Qaeda thrives in any vacuum of influence. The bloody hostage crisis at the oil
field in southern Algeria, in January, was linked to French intervention in
Mali; in April, the French Embassy in Tripoli was bombed; and in May, in Niger
(another weak state that shares a border with Libya), bombers killed nearly
thirty people. This year, two prominent secular politicians have been
assassinated in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began. In a separate incident
last week, terrorists apparently operating from the Algerian border killed
eight Tunisian soldiers. On Tuesday, tens of thousands of Tunisians took to the
streets of Tunis to demand the resignation of the governing Islamists. With
post-Mubarak and, now, post-Morsi Egypt under increasingly assertive military
control, the Arab Spring appears to have been replaced by spreading chaos.

Given the Obama administration’s foreign policy follies, you
would think that the Republican Party would be bringing it all to the attention
of the American people. You would be wrong.

The Republican responset has been pathetically weak. Last
week the doddering John McCain and his sidekick, Lindsey Graham allowed
themselves to represent the president on a trip to Egypt. .

At a time when the Egyptian military is tamping down the
influence of one of the world’s leading terrorist incubators, the Muslim
Brotherhood, and when the same military has begun cooperating with the Israeli government in
the fight against Sinai terrorists, the Obama administration, aided and abetted
by McCain and Graham have been out there supporting… you guessed it… the Muslim
Brotherhood.

In the
eyes of tens of millions of Egyptians, Senators John McCain’s and Lindsey
Graham’s recent words and deeds in Egypt — which have the “blessing”
of President Obama — have unequivocally proven that U.S. leadership is aligning
with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egyptian
media is awash with stories of the growing anger regarding this policy.

A top
advisor to Egypt’s Interim President Adly Mansour formally accused McCain
of distorting facts to the benefit of the Brotherhood. He dismissed McCain’s
recent remarks as “irrational” and “moronic.” Ahmed al-Zind,
head of the Egyptian Judge Club, has called for the arrest and trial of
McCain for “trying to destroy Egypt.” The leader of the youth movement Tamarod (meaning
“Rebellion,” against the Brotherhood), which played a major role in mobilizing
the June 30 revolution, said: “We reject John McCain and call on the
international community to let the [Egyptian] people decide their own fate.”

As for the typically empty McCain claim that he is upholding
principle, Ibraham debunks the notion:

If he
considers the ouster of the Brotherhood government to be a military coup, why
didn’t he extend that distinction at the fall of Mubarak’s more moderate
government, which was also removed by the military in response to popular
protests? If McCain’s argument is that Morsi was democratically elected and
Mubarak was not, then why was the U.S. giving Egypt billions in aid for
decades? Did not this aid legitimize Mubarak’s government no less than Morsi’s?

Further
angering Egyptians is McCain’s insistence that all arrested Brotherhood members
and other Islamists be released from prison. As Musa said, McCain’s stance does
not address that Brotherhood leadership is awaiting trial on serious charges:
inciting terrorism, causing the murder of Egyptians, and grand treason by
conspiring with foreign powers against Egypt’s interests.

McCain
claims he is simply interested in the human rights of the incarcerated
Brotherhood members, a statement that is additionally curious. If human rights
are at issue, why has McCain and the U.S. administration been ambivalent
regarding the fate of Hosni Mubarak? Morsi faces perhaps more serious charges
than Mubarak does, yet McCain calls for his release.

I suspect that McCain is channeling his idiot daughter.

But, there is something that Republicans can do about the
situation. Lindsey Graham is up for re-election next year. He is going to be
challenged in the South Carolina Republican primary. Let’s hope that voters in
the Palmetto State retire him.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

McCain's juvenile intransigence is only matched by his juvenile desire to be liked by the "right people." I suspect the Muslim Brotherhood fits the bill, just like the mainstream American press before they turned on him upon his disastrous presidential run. Detect a pattern?

I'm not surprised by McCain's reference to "human rights". That's been the fig leaf for the Obama administration's Machiavellian realpolitik across the Mideast as it joined the Europeans in placing all bets on what they considered to the team that will win in the end: the Islamists.

In the news the other day it was reported that the US will take several thousand "refugees" from Syria. A couple of weeks ago, I read a piece cautioning that all this would accomplish would be to import a new cohort of hardcore Islamist radicals and terrorists into the US. But it's going to happen because it's part of the humanitarian fig leaf needed to excuse away the Administration's disastrous exercise in self-interested foreign adventuring.

It should be said that, except of the naked military involvement in Libya to overthrow the old regime, none of this is thematically new. The Bush administration did the same, reaching out to Islamists across North Africa and undermining our allies and non-enemies there.